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Pat Garrett
& Billy the Kid
by Garrett Chaffin-Quiray
Garrett Chaffin-Quiray is a writer living in New York City.
He has sponsored film festivals, taught cinema history, and published a
number of critical essays, dozens of reviews and one short story.
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973, USA, 106
mins/1986, 122 mins)
Source: BFI Prod Co: MGM Prod: Gordon
Carroll Dir: Sam Peckinpah Scr: Rudy Wurlitzer Ph: John Coquillon Ed: Roger
Spottiswoode, Garth Craven, Robert L. Wolfe, Richard Halsey, David Berlatsky,
Tony de Zarraga Mus: Bob Dylan
Cast: James Coburn (Pat Garrett), Kris Kristofferson
(Billy the Kid), Richard Jaeckel (Sheriff Kip McKinney), Katy Jurado (Mrs.
Baker), Chill Wills (Lemuel), Barry Sullivan (Chisum), Jason Robards (Governor
Lew Wallace), Bob Dylan (Alias), R.G. Armstrong (Bob Ollinger), Luke Askew
(Eno), John Beck (Poe), Richard Bright (Holly), Matt Clark (J.W. Bell),
Rita Coolidge (Maria), Jack Elam (Alamosa Bill), Emilio Fernández
(Paco), Paul Fix (Pete Maxwell), L.Q. Jones (Black Harris), Slim Pickens
(Sheriff Baker), Charles Martin Smith (Charlie), Harry Dean Stanton (Luke),
Rudy Wurlitzer (O'Folliard), Sam Peckinpah (Will)
David Samuel Peckinpah was born February 21, 1925 in
Fresno, CA. In World War II he enlisted in the Marines,
although he never saw combat. Following his release, he
became the protégé of Don Siegel.
In the late 1950s he worked in TV before turning to feature
films. After years of hard living he died of a heart attack
on December 28, 1984 in Inglewood, CA.
Fleshing
out this schematic portrait, Peckinpah was noted for
his Westerns set along the edge
of modern civilization. His heroes are caught in a changing
world where individualism is a liability and violence an
easy reflex. Often this tendency further abets obsolescence
or else outright destruction because, in the director's
own words, “There is a great streak of violence in
every human being. If it is not channeled and understood,
it will break out in war or in madness.” (1)
Once
Peckinpah's loners become outlaws, “the
individual survives through his ability to analyze his
chances realistically and then make his play as fairly
as the circumstances permit.”(2) The
result is a theme upon which all his work turns, just as
its ready-made solipsism reflects on the director. Thus
Peckinpah's films alternate between triumph and failure,
typically depending on the balance struck between his alcoholism
and the strength of the property in question.
After a praiseworthy debut in The Deadly Companions (1961),
his sophomore effort, Ride the High Country (1962)
was, and still is, considered a masterwork of the Western
form. Major Dundee (1965) followed as both a critical
and commercial failure wherein Peckinpah's producer, Jerry
Bresler, released the film with drastic cuts as one half
of a double feature. Several years lapsed without similar
work before Peckinpah was attached to The Wild Bunch (1969).
Upon its release critics and fans polarized into a field
of detractors and supporters, earning him the nickname “Bloody
Sam” due to the film's graphic violence.
Four films followed in the next three
years. Straw Dogs (1971) and The Getaway (1972)
were bonafide hits preceded by the little seen The Ballad
of Cable Hogue (1970) and interrupted by the Steve
McQueen vehicle, Junior Bonner (1972). Then there
appeared a Billy the Kid project at MGM. Although warned
against it, Peckinpah agree to the project for $228,000
and profit participation (3), meaning
the highly idiosyncratic, hardheaded, boozer-turned-artiste
terrible, was being asked to produce a film about an
idiosyncratic, hardheaded boozer-turned-American hero.
“The
Smiling Cobra”
Originally undertaken as a project
for director Monte Hellman, then associated with MGM for
his film Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Rudy Wurlitzer's
script for Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was offered
to Peckinpah following the commercial failure of Hellman's
film (4). It detailed the final days of
William Bonney and was largely based on the historical
record.
Choosing simultaneously to embrace the Kid's legend while
attempting realist detail, Peckinpah spun Pat Garrett into
a tragic character epitomizing compromise and released
Billy into the stratosphere of idealism. Each man therefore
echoed the other in a tale of opposing codes and moral
equivalents meant to inhabit an even larger canvas than The
Wild Bunch.
Signed to play Billy, Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes
scholar and former Air Force Captain. Also a successful
country musician, he'd appeared in The Last Movie (Dennis
Hopper, 1971) but it was his role in Cisco Pike (Bill
L. Norton, 1972) that led to Pat Garrett & Billy the
Kid. Opposite him as Pat Garrett was James Coburn,
a bit player from Major Dundee, who was possessed
of gaunt cheeks, gray-white hair and a gravelly voice.
Bob
Dylan was the final 'star' cast in the minor role of
Alias. First courted to compose the film's soundtrack,
including use of his song “Knockin' on Heaven's Door,” producer
Gordon Carroll signed Dylan for his feature debut, Don't
Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967) notwithstanding.
All appeared well by the fall of 1972. Rewrites, while
painful to Wurlitzer, were accomplished. A cast and crew
of Peckinpah veterans were assembled. Locations were scouted
and the production schedule negotiated until the buck stopped
at MGM President Jim Aubrey.
A
graduate of Princeton, Aubrey was groomed at CBS where
he'd become president in 1959. Over
the course of his years there he'd been a tight-fisted
manager with unknown creative sensitivities. Once billionaire
financier Kirk Kerkorian hired him in 1969 to manage MGM,
the pearl from one of his acquisitions, the “smiling
cobra,” as he was dubbed, moved center stage. (5)
Like all the Big 5 Studios from the Classical era, MGM
was in decline. Aubrey arrived to staunch the flow of debt,
not only from failed films and TV productions, but also
from Kerkorian's leveraging of studio assets to build an
MGM-themed Las Vegas casino. Into this context of corporate
decline and conglomeration, Pat Garrett & Billy the
Kid was green-lighted for production in Durango, Mexico.
At its helm was the iconoclastic auteur, Sam Peckinpah,
a likable analog to Billy the Kid. At its stern was Jim
Aubrey, the echo of sell-out Pat Garrett, readying for
big-time box office without a parachute for failure.
Pioneer
with a Pistol
“Best of enemies. Deadliest of friends.” So
read the film's tagline and therein its plot. Not only
was Pat Garrett a former confederate of Billy the Kid,
he was also the man forced through changing circumstances
to run-off, or else kill, his friend.
Opening in 1909, Pat rides with a former associate named
Poe (John Beck) who ambushes and kills him, each shot delivered
in slow motion with cross-cuts of chickens buried up to
their necks for target practice. Flashback to 1881. Billy
and his gang are seen shooting the chickens when Pat rides
up for some whiskey and to tell Billy how things have changed.
Where the pair of outlaws had once ridden against landowners
encroaching on the open frontier, especially the cattle
rancher John Chisum (Barry Sullivan), Pat has taken the
job of Sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico. He's thusly
become part of the establishment, his directive to rid
the landscape of Billy and his ilk. Soon afterwards Billy
is captured, only to escape from Pat's minions, whereupon
the two begin a reluctant chase. Naturally, complications
ensue as the calling of Billy's outlaw code falls into
conflict with Pat's sense of compromise.
Assessing the director's fascination
with his eponymous heroes, David Sterritt writes,
Peckinpah
sees the Old West's decline as a strange and troubling occurrence,
a time, when established chaos
yielded painfully to a dubious new order. The Growth of empire – social,
financial, governmental – underlies his view. Yet he
worries most about those excluded by the growing empire,
men whose natural language is one of hopelessly self-seeking
violence. (6) To wit, the innocent
and guilty die side-by-side while Billy fights off roaming
gunmen and Pat builds a ragtag posse. Along the way Governor
Lew Wallace (Jason Robards) is asked to intervene as Billy
becomes a target for reluctant lawmen like Sheriff Baker
(Slim Pickens) and a friend to hangers-on like frontier vagabond
Alias.
In the end, Pat triumphs. After allowing Billy one final
embrace in the arms of his lover Maria (Rita Coolidge),
Pat kills him for the promise of a long life filled with
regret.
An uneven film, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is
filled with Old West tableaux punctuated by slow motion
shoot-outs and paint-filled squibs. Throughout the production
design contributes to historical immediacy, almost as if
the filming of 1881 were subjected to documentary impulses.
Flies circle. Sunshine washes out the scenery. Men play
poker and drink whiskey.
While little can be made of the central performances,
save for inhabiting the archetypal dichotomy of individuals
versus society, Coburn's weather beaten features are magnificent.
Less can be offered to Kristofferson who's several years
too old for Billy, a 21-year old when he died, and the
appearance of Dylan, Robards, Pickens et. al. is
little more than a pleasant distraction.
Where the movie soars is in its gunfights and subtle
characterization of defeated men marching to their end.
The former strength is ably displayed when Billy breaks
out of Pat's jail, killing a deputy with 16 dimes seen
individually bursting from a shotgun barrel. The latter
trait is later epitomized when Pat shoots Billy and then
fires on his own mirror image. His killing rage ended,
the second bullet signals the death of his conscience and
the better part of himself.
Multiple Versions
Budgeted at $3 million, Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid was finally delivered to
theaters in July 1973 for a cost of $4,638,783 (7).
Long a problem child, disputes between Aubrey and Peckinpah
were remarked on in trade papers and the mainstream media,
dogging the production at every turn. Paul D. Zimmerman
noted in summary of the result, “This new film is
a casualty of a prolonged shoot-out between director
Sam Peckinpah and MGM president James Aubrey.”(8)
Once lauded for his spirited independence, Peckinpah
was now derided for being a drunken egomaniac unable to
responsibly direct a movie. Not to be overlooked, Aubrey
was called out for being a banker-for-hire in whose studio
money continued to hemorrhage as a result of skewed priorities.
Heedlessly, they fell on one another's sword, each to his
ruin.
When simmering tensions exploded in
the spring of 1973, Peckinpah had already delivered two
versions of his director's cut. Based on negative previews,
Aubrey assigned a host of editors to the picture and began
retooling it without benefit of a unified vision. In effect,
the career bureaucrat recognized a troubled investment
and wrested control away from its creator to deliver a
viable product. According to Rex Reed, “Mutilated
editing, clumsy casting, terrible acting, abominable dialogue – a
check-list of all the things wrong with this dumbbell of
a movie reads like a primer on how not to make a western.”(9) Nevertheless,
Aubrey's cut was released.
Running 106-minutes, the original theatrical print is
absent the bookend sequence of Pat's death. This fundamental
change, while purposefully focused on the more violent
sequences for which Peckinpah was famous, meant the depth
of pathos in the picture was rendered schizophrenic.
Variety commented, “Whereas
Peckinpah's nostalgia for a frontier world where might
was right and women were for the taking has previously
been communicated via forceful acting and striking visuals, here
there are few graces to camouflage the narrative banality.”(10) Judith
Crist called the film, “a new low in pointless moviemaking,”(11) Tom
Vallance referred to it as “an almost total disaster,”(12) and
Vincent Canby specified, “The music is so oppressive
that when it stops we feel giddy with relief, as if a tooth
had suddenly stopped aching.”(13)
Still, there were fans. Jay Cocks
praised it as, “the richest, most exciting American
film so far this year,”(14) to
which Tom Milne added, “'Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid' is Peckinpah's best film to date.”(15) Aljean
Harmetz even fairly suggested, “There are half a dozen
things wrong with Sam Peckinpah's 'Pat Garrett and Billy
the Kid'…. Yet 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' may
very well be Peckinpah's best film.”(16)
Audiences were similarly confused
and generally stayed away. For 1973 the top five American
films, according to theatrical rentals, were The Poseidon
Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972) with $40 million, Deliverance (John
Boorman, 1972) with $18 million, The Getaway with
$17.5 million, Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton, 1973)
with $15.5 million and Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich,
1973) with $13 million. Filling out the top 100 titles
were several westerns illustrating the genre's continued
popularity, among them Jeremiah Johnson (Sydney
Pollack, 1972) with $8,350,000 at number 18, High Plains
Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1972) with $7,125,000 at number
20, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (John Huston,
1972) with $7 million at number 21, and, at number 52, Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid earning $2.7 million (17).
Stung by failure, frustrated by Aubrey
and ostracized for bad behavior, Peckinpah arranged for
his director's cut to be stolen and stored in his personal
vault (18). Discovered only after his
death, this longer version was first screened for the public
on April 20, 1986. Running 122 minutes, it includes the
Pat Garrett framing device, a more muted use of Dylan's
soundtrack and several other sequences that have since
been considered integral to the picture in this, its signature
form.
Upon wider release, a cult of director's
cut aficionados and scholars sprouted. Remarking on this
later picture, J. Hoberman wrote, “the abundant violence
and leathery camaraderie, ritualistic killing and mucho
macho posturing, the incidental cockfights and lipsmacking
whiskey guzzling, the rub-a-dub-dub, four-whores-in-a-tub
partying and the towheaded kids who amuse themselves by
swinging on the hangman's noose are all pure Peckinpah.”(19)
To fans, Hoberman's near-insult summation is little more
than an invitation to see the film. Already a mythologized
title from the early 1970s, Pat Garrett & Billy the
Kid may very well be Peckinpah's final masterwork before
the decline of his later years and early death.
© Garrett
Chaffin-Quiray, February 2003
Endnotes:
- Aljean
Harmetz, “Man Was A Killer Long Before
He Served a God,” The New York Times (August 31, 1969):
D9.
- Garner
Simmons, “Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett
and Billy the Kid,” Velvet Light Trap (Spring 1974):
34-36 (35).
- David Weddle, If
They Move – Kill 'em!: The
Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah (New York: Grove Press, 1994)
455.
- Simmons, 34-36 (35).
- Marshall Fine, Bloody Sam: The Life and Films
of Sam Peckinpah (New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1991) 243.
- David
Sterritt, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” Christian
Science Monitor (May 26, 1973): 14.
- Weddle, 490.
- Paul
D. Zimmerman, “Western Omelette,” Newsweek (June
11, 1973): 104.
- Rex
Reed, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” New
York Daily News (June 8, 1973): 72.
- “Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid,” Variety (May
30, 1973): 13.
- Judith
Crist, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” New
York (June 11, 1973): 85.
- Tom
Vallance, “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid,” Film (October
1973): 18.
- Vincent
Canby, “Screen: Peckinpah's Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid,” The New York Times D53.
- Jay
Cocks, “Outlaw Blues: Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid,” Time (June 1, 1973): 70.
- Tom
Milne, “The Last Days of Billy,” London
Observer (September 2, 1973): 33.
- Aljean
Harmetz, “'Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid': What you see on screen… And what you don't see,” The
New York Times (June 17, 1973): B13.
- “Big
Rental Films of 1973,” Variety (January
9, 1974): 19, 60.
- “Peckinpah's
Cut Of 'Pat Garrett' Finally Emerges For A Screening,” Variety (May 7, 1986): 110.
- J.
Hoberman, “Once Upon a Time in America,” The
Village Voice (May 16, 1989): 63.
© Senses
of Cinema 1999-2002 |
